


Avoidable, But Ultimately Awesome

by homecriticismchef



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Death, Family Fluff, Gambling, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 12:29:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6284623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homecriticismchef/pseuds/homecriticismchef
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are ways to keep up with current events, even in the underworld. Sigrun Larsen was having a pretty good time tracking her namesake's progress through life; still, maybe making a bet on when and how the next Sigrun will join her in Helheim wasn't such a great idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avoidable, But Ultimately Awesome

The years still passed here. They were absolutely _years_ in Helheim too, even if there wasn't any sun in sight for this place to be swinging around. They felt the same. Years and decades, still pretty long.

 Regardless of how many years had passed: sometimes, especially when Gunnar did come by, and very especially after Goran arrived with a young-again face behind his ridiculously-long gray beard, it felt just like those last (or first) days in Dalsnes, cut off from the hurried world with only traces to pick up on and discuss, and all of their old responsibilities delayed or disposed of; nothing new, yet, to take their place.

 And then Goran learned how he could, even in the underworld, do the crossword.

 “How are you filling that in, son?” Berit asked. Goran jerked upright, and some water sloshed out of his square wooden bowl. He'd never quite gotten used to the old woman in life, Sigrun remembered: his usual underlying nervousness had turned into a weird, jumpy subservience after Aksel's grandmother arrived and started doling out survival tips, teaching them all whatever she could to make them live as long as she had. Not that they hadn't all been pretty jumpy back then, but really.

 Ah, life memories.

 “Oh, well, I guess it's sort of like when you go to the river and see what you wanted to?” He was referring to the afterlife entertainment of going to one of the Gjöll's grassier banks, staring into the water, and focusing on someone or someplace still left in the world until it appeared to you, small but impossibly clear, in the bright sections of water between the river's endless schools of sharp, improbably buoyant knives. “But I want to see letters where they go in the crossword.” He nodded. His beard dipped into the bowl; some lingering sense of permanence made Sigrun expect it to come out covered in the last names of midlist actors from six decades ago. Back when actors were a thing.

 “Wait.” Ingrid, who'd had her head on her arms, and whose hair did this weird _thing_ sometimes where it developed blood-red patches, then went solidly blond again, sat upright. “You pulled that water from the Gjöll for _crosswords?_ ”

 “I just wondered if it would work. After I almost fell in last month -”

 “Oh, that's what you were trying to do? Sheesh.” Gunnar was making his rounds again – weird, silent rounds, usually, until he got to their table and started staring at them all unnervingly. “I'm glad I caught you, but ...”

 “Are there rules about what you can do with river water?” Goran's eyes had gone wide, and he was looking at Ingrid like a kid worried he'd accidentally fed the dog chocolate. “I still don't really know how things work here! You guys need to stop me if -”

 “Shh.” Ingrid raised a forefinger to Goran's lips. “I'm sure if it were going to kill you, you'd be dead already.”

 Goran actually sighed with relief before he got it. Ingrid grinned and clapped her hands over his cheeks; Sigrun just howled.

 Berit joined in with a chuckle. “You'll get used to things eventually, son. And that _is_ clever. I'd never considered scrying in a portable fashion, myself!”

 Goran grinned, even as he was going both red and green in the face.

 Sigrun had chosen a pretty gorgeous silver tray for their receptacle, and she only had to knock a few chalices from the table to make room for it.

“Sigrun, I just _started_ that coffee – wait, is that bottle Gjöll water?”

 “Yes, sweetie, straight from the torrent.” She paused in her pouring to grin broadly. “Now we'll have to see how long it keeps, because running out there this morning was kind of a hassle.”

 Aksel frowned. His hair was gray sometimes, here, but so rarely. Mostly when his face was doing that. “But you always – run in the mornings ...” He actually put a hand over his mouth to make himself stop talking. _No one_ was supposed to know she went running, they'd think she was a health nut. _That. Stupid. Non-keeper of secrets._ No wonder she was doomed to love this guy forever.

 “Okay, shh. Or don't shh, tell me what you want to see.”

 “Can't I just think it?”

 “I don't know. Wouldn't it be better if we both think it? You should just tell me.”

 “Okay! Except you know what I want to see.”

 “I do?”

  
“ _Karin._ ” Aksel was looking at her, not blinking enough.

 She was blinking a lot, trying to remember. “Karin?”

 “Ingvar's wife? So … our granddaughter-in-law. Who's having a baby, or already has? Like, this week.” Aksel's hair went gray again when he said “granddaughter,” and held until he rolled his eyes.

 “Okay, okay! But no. How do you keep _track_ of this stuff?”

 Aksel shrugged. “Practice?”

 He did have more practice than she did.

 They'd missed it, though. Well, not that watching an entire human birth was exactly something one missed out on – Sigrun's own memories still made her grit her teeth, and she'd been _out of it_ some of the times she went through it – but the point was, they had another great-grandkid, and this one was in the Eide line.

 (There had to be some way to tease Aksel about that part, she just hadn't thought of it yet.)

 It was yet another redheaded infant, like her father but a lot balder. It was screaming just as loudly as Sigrun remembered Ingvar had at that lack-of-age (though she'd been corporeally in the room with _that_ kid, so she couldn't just upend a silver tray if she wanted to stop hearing it. Actually, just thinking she'd like to not hear it seemed to be working. Nice. How did she keep forgetting that death had so many upsides, however petty they were?)

 “Ooh, it's definitely a human.”

 Aksel looked up to squint at her. “Did you just _mute_ the … mystic water vision?”

 “Sorry, sorry.” Sigrun tried to convince the fabric of reality that she absolutely wanted to hear this baby scream. It wasn't easy. But finally:

 “Honey, she's gorgeous.” Their grandson.  
  
“So they wiped off the goop?” That was – Karin?

 “Congratulations, Karin.” Yep, Karin. No idea who the woman congratulating her was. Was Dalsnes that big by now? She'd known _everyone_ there back when she died.

“Thank you, but this is _never happening again._ ” The new mother, leaning into the corner of some kind of half-backed couch, let her head loll to the side. “I mean, I'm sure all new mothers say that -”

 In Helheim, the vision was gathering a bit of a crowd. As the in-water conversation turned mundane, Sigrun let her attention drift back to her real surroundings. “Is that legal?” “Nope, afterlife lawyers will be _seriously_ going after this lady.” And more normal, stupid but necessary reactions, like, “Oh, it's a new baby!” “So that's their family?”

 Sigrun was so busy holding in her laughter – she didn't want to spray spit into the river water and ruin the vision or something – that she almost missed a few very, very criticial words being exchanged back on the surface of the living world.

 “And you still want to call her Sigrun? I mean, you were so sure we'd have -”

 “I like the name, babe.” Heavy-lidded Karin had taken her still-noisy baby into her arms, and talked thickly - but loudly enough to sound over the noise. “Maybe it's your family's name, not mine, but come on. What mother wouldn't want a valkyrie?” Smiling, then, into her daughter's face. “It sounds good. Sigrun Eide.”

 Sigrun didn't mean to gape, obviously. Or to seek out Aksel's eyes, and find him gaping too.

 Finally, when she could speak: “We have to tell Berit.”

 “We have to tell everyone -”

“Okay, sure, but her first. She absolutely _cannot_ keep calling me 'little Sigrun' when there's an actual _baby_ named after me.”

 Though he watched her stalk off, smiling like a petite predator, Aksel stayed hunched over the water-filled tray. And even looked back to it, just in time to see his grandson crawl awkwardly onto the couch, stretching out alongside the rest of the world's living Eides.

* * *

 

“Wait, they sign up for this stuff at _twelve_ now? You can't tell me -”

 “It's _training_ they start then – if they want to. Which she obviously does!”

 “Oh, no.” Aksel was slouching, pacing up and down the meadow, dropping his face into his hands and then looking up to almost start an indignant sentence before he gave up again. “This is not even remotely okay. She's a baby.”

 “So were our kids, once. And theirs.” _And all of them were frankly likely to ever exist in the first place._ Sigrun had, over the last several years, found _so many reasons_ to be mad at Goran for his little scrying innovation. And she had, accordingly, been talked down by several people who reminded her that everyone here had a choice, not just of how much to hold on to the world of the living, but of which ties to maintain past the grave.

 It was like they thought she wanted to kick her worrywart life-husband into a closed dungeon where she couldn't hear him moan about what was happening to the world because she _didn't_ still love him to bits. Weirdos. Well, she couldn't help with that. But maybe …

 “What if you just stop watching? I mean, none of this – I'll still be checking, or Berit will, and we can just tell you if we see anything big. Because you -”

 “No! How could I stop? That's our family, in there – or up there, but appearing -”

 She was pretty glad they were in the meadow, right now, and not in one of the halls where he'd just be stressing everybody out again. He kept ranting. And she had a moment of clarity.

 She usually hated those things, but okay. “Aksel.” She took three large steps, the kind she'd developed in all those living years of keeping up with anyone taller than she was (so, pretty much everyone). She caught one hand, tugged him around and caught the other. “You're freaked out because the world is still hanging on by a thread, right?”

 He stared at her. He widened his eyes, then had to blink, and she breathed in.

 “And we still have family there. How many of the people here _don't_?” Now she was probably being kind of a jerk, but damn it, she had to make him calm down somehow. Permanently would be good. “We made it pretty far, and our kids are _still_ fine. We're … ongoing. And I don't know what the something is that made it happen so far, but do you really think it's going to run out like that? Do you think that our offspring are any wimpier than _we_ were, back in year 0, talking about how cool it would be to live like it was the 1700s or whatever we said?”

 Aksel frowned. Gray hair. “I was never the one saying it would be cool.”

 “Well, maybe your worrying mixed with my total undauntedness just right, and we left invincible descendants behind. And maybe you need to trust that they'll do as well as anyone can.” Aksel tugged her into a hug halfway through the sentence, and she had to turn her head so her mouth wasn't smashed against the right side of his chest. But he seemed to get the message, because he said he would stop watching at least for a while, and she said that was good, and he just had to add that she of course was going to keep watching, and she answered that she'd be sure to have Berit there to hold her hand if things got scary.

 Not that she'd ever admit it, but she truly meant that last part.

 

* * *

 

Berit Eide had a dark sense of humor, when she wasn't holding it back to protect someone (Aksel) – and it really, really showed when Hulda died.

 “Dad, please,” the woman was saying, stuck in her dad's arms in the middle of breakfast in their afterlife hall. “It's okay. I'm handling being dead. I had a good life.”

 “You were so young -”

 “I was 72! You -” and there the strawberry-blonde, who had definitely been more red-haired last time Sigrun saw her, choked up too. “You didn't live that long.”

 “Honey, I'm so sorry.”

 “Don't be. I just said I lived longer than you.”

 And Berit didn't snicker, but she somehow made a noise with her tongue that caught Sigrun's attention, and whatever the joke was must have been good because it made Hulda laugh extremely hard.

 

* * *

 

Sigrun did check in on her granddaughter-namesake, of course. She couldn't help it – it made her feel just a little bit immortal, watching the rapidly-growing girl conquer obstacle courses in training, watching her hoard and examine so many sheathed knives on her room's desk that she wound up filling in worksheets – and later, reports – in the middle of the floor. And leaving them there, and stepping on them with muddy boots. Sigrun wasn't lucky enough to actually see her namesake tell an instructor she'd been trying to produce a report that reflected realistic field conditions, but one of the girl's fellow soldiers recounted the story and slapped Sigrun on the back at their – graduation? Maybe they called that sort of thing a graduation. Who knew, now.

 (Probably the next of her descendants to show up in Helheim would know. She would wait very patiently, if she had to. Though if this Sigrun's life path was anything to go by, she wasn't really expecting it would take long.)

 Berit, unfortunately, noticed right away the first time she saw her great-great-granddaughter at her full height. “Well, she certainly can't be _little_ Sigrun now, either.” And she'd seen her fight. “No offense, dear, but you couldn't throw over the average troll so easily. Not that this recklessness won't get her killed eventually.”

 “Well,” Sigrun found herself saying, “maybe she'll save a lot of weaker people before that happens. Scared people.” Since when was she advocating for a look on the bright side?

 “Shorter people, as well.”

 Aksel would never believe it, but Berit could be _vicious._

 

* * *

 

And then it turned into a bet, but that genuinely wasn't Sigrun's fault.

 It was either Berit or Hulda who said it: “Either that girl makes captain within a year, or she makes dinner for a giant.” It had to be Berit, Sigrun thought, because while Hulda was kind of a social idiot sometimes it was hard to imagine her saying something like that about family _to her grandmother_.

 (Sigrun had, incidentally, stopped thinking about having never seen any of her ancestors here a very long time before Hulda showed up. Now she just thought that they were probably trolls, and hoped it was at least occasionally a good time for them, from a demonic hellbeast point of view.

 She knew it probably wasn't.)

 Still, Sigrun couldn't stop herself from answering. “Captain. Within six months – well, if they're doing promotions then.”

“Oh?”

 Hulda had her back, though. Sort of. “Maybe she dies after ten years in command. Just when she was thinking of packing it in and settling down, too.”

 “Well, she'll be like forty in ten years.” Sigrun shook her head. “Besides, you _know_ she'll be last to leave a hot spot, technically because it's her responsibility as captain or higher but also because she's showing off. She'll die in a way that's avoidable, but ultimately awesome.”

 “Okay, but when?” Hulda had paused to tilt her head mid-sentence, but she still finished it. So it was on.

 “Hmm. Take it back to five years, I don't like waiting to collect my winnings. ”

 Berit laughed at both of them, and they both turned to her, Sigrun in a state of what she thought she remembered as shock. (Been a while since she felt it.)

 “What exactly are you two betting, here?”

 “Pure satisfaction. Being right,” Sigrun said, but Hulda followed up with, “Do we really care?”

 Berit shrugged. “I care. Because I'm betting against both of your predictions, and in five years I want to know what I'll be collecting.”

 Sigrun cocked her head. “Okay, you crazy old woman. Name your price.”

  

* * *

 

 

Just in time for her bet to come due, but in the middle of such an otherwise-normal year in the living world that Sigrun almost _missed it:_ little-though-tall Sigrun signed up for an expedition into Denmark.

 Which somehow didn't sound sinister to her until she actually told Aksel about it. Since she'd promised to mention anything big that happened.

 “What? How?” He dropped his head over his afterlife eggs and toast (stupid stuff tasted exactly like normal eggs and toast, too). Goran had looked up from his puzzle, and dropped a hand on his friend's shoulder. Ingrid sipped from a cup, put it back on the table. Suspiciously mellow, even for her.

 “Wait, did you guys _know_ something about this?”

 Ingrid shrugged. “One of our grandsons retired recently, and started some kind of Denmark-based project. Well, maybe eventually a few places in the Silent World. I didn't catch that much.”

 “Yeah, it was this fluke with the crossword – the clue was something about cobblestones, and then there's Trond in some stuffy meeting.” Goran blinked. “Man, he's old now, Ingrid.”

 “Yep. And bearded. But really, nobody seemed that worried – it's not like they're sending an army, like they did that time years ago.”

 They all remembered _that time years ago_ , because they'd had a lot of new company, for a while, before the shell-shocked non-survivors of the primarily Danish assault figured out where the hell to go for an afterlife they hadn't been counting on. And that was just a few of the confused ones.

 “What makes it different, though?” Aksel turned his head to show part of his face, but still looked desperately upset. “Do the mutation-beasts have a natural lifespan we didn't know about? That's a big thing not to _tell me_ , Sigrun.”

 “Yeah, I would have told you if that were the case. So -”

 “Hey, if she dies in battle, is that so bad?” Ingrid's tone made it clear she didn't think so.

 “Of course it's bad! It's death!”

 “A heroic death, though – honey, think about it. Yours was pretty heroic too, clearing a way out of that fire for those idiot teenagers!” Sigrun paused, caught Ingrid's eye, and remembered something else. “Ingrid, you died bringing down three trolls at once, right? And that's little Sigrun's usual job these days, so how much more danger could -” she felt a tap on her shoulder, and turned her head - “there be in Denmark?”

 Berit rested a hand on Sigrun's head, but spoke to Aksel. “Hulda says her son heard some interesting things in Iceland. About an expedition.”

 “That's the hot topic,” Ingrid chimed in. “Sigrun, to be fair I had some help with those trolls -”

 “Yeah, yeah.” Sigrun waved a hand. “So, Berit, do you know something about this?”

 “Possibly. Enough to suspect I'll be collecting my dues from you quite soon, dear.”

 Oh, no. She'd almost forgotten. “Wait, what does -”

 “Dues?” Aksel shot up, almost started to stand.

 “No, don't tell him -” whoops, that was out loud.

 “All in good time, little Sigrun.”

 Berit moved on, and somehow Sigrun got Ingrid into a debate about the last years of their lives that seemed to thoroughly sink the subject of the bet.

 

(She didn't keep secrets from Aksel anymore, unless she knew he wouldn't understand. This was one of those times. He just wasn't the type to express his growing respect for a descendant by betting on when and how heroically she'd bite the dust. Hulda obviously got it, or she never would have made the bet; and obviously Berit was coming around, maybe because her chance to humiliate “little Sigrun” was so very nigh; but it just wasn't a way of looking at things Aksel would _get_.)

 

* * *

 

 

The expedition was a nail-biter. Incredibly bad bridges over waterways infested with former whales: check. Buildings blowing up: check. (That time, she could admit to herself that she was glad not to see event itself, only hearing it described in a probably watered-down radio report as given by the tiny, screwed-up expedition crew. It probably wasn't too much like how Aksel had died, but she'd still pass on Eides even _almost_ dying in fire, given her druthers.)

 And of course, there were horrifically mutated beings, which she was unlucky enough to only see in any immediate fashion twice, though lucky enough that one of the times, the being was definitely a giant, and it was definitely stalking the crew, staying all-too-successfully out of sight. Or was the giant-sighting also unlucky? She was getting those mixed up in brand new ways, this fifth year.

 There were also ghosts, which showed up in the Gjöll's water looking an awful lot like full-color photographs of perfectly normal people, just stretched out on a flawed reflective surface. But they didn't act like people, and they seemed to want to be back in normal bodies for a while there. Longing looks, attempted possessions, that sort of thing. Sigrun was pretty sure that, were her namesake invaded by a handful of vengeful shades, the woman's natural self would be showing up in Helheim pretty fast no matter what her corporeal remnants got up to.

 (And that wouldn't have been a heroic way to go, especially if her crew went with her. Sigrun would still probably lose the bet.)

 Of course she didn't want to _win,_ even halfway. The bet – for all that it was about when a living person would die, and how – had been about envisioning greatness for a loved one. Respect and honor. And while she didn't really know what _Hulda_ had been thinking, she figured it had to be the sort of detached perspective on the living world that any sane dead person would develop eventually. Even before, you know, the apocalypse and what it had wrought.

 It was normal, right?

 

Still, there came a morning when Berit tapped her on the shoulder and held up a hand with five fingers extended, and she sighed with relief. Even though it was stupid, even though everyone would die sometime and it may as well happen in an awesome way, when her namesake got to it, she was thrilled.

 Thrilled, except that now she had to fall into the least blade-loaded part of the Gjöll she could find, while keeping in sight of the largest group of strangers possible. She had to make it look like an accident, cry out dramatically about her regrets drowning her while keeping reasonably afloat and un-chopped, and thank Berit profusely when she “appeared out of nowhere” to toss her a hideous orange life vest. (What kind of underworld produced hideous orange life vests? Were the knives for show, so drowning was actually a threat?)

 The only upside was that she figured – water, knife wounds, whatever – it wasn't like the stunt was going to kill her.

 She fell in. She surfaced, but could have sworn she felt the knives swarming her way like sharks toward a wrecked whaling boat. Blinked water out of her eyes, hit in the face with orange, screamed later than she'd meant to in the pretend-scared plan but it probably sounded like pretty real fear because it was.

 Vaguely, she heard Berit's voice, but she pushed her torso over the vest and paddled to the bank – back to her tormentor – faster than the echoes could die. She crawled out, soggy, shaky, and took the vest out with her only to realise what she was doing and toss the stupid thing back into the Gjöll.

 (The knives did flock, just under the water, looking like slightly-stiff eels refracted through the surface.)

 The crowd, confused but admiring, surrounded Berit to ask stupid questions like “were you a lifeguard when you were alive?” and occasionally looked over to Sigrun to reassure her that she was all right now, no need to be so frightened. But wasn't she lucky to have a rescuer, just in case? Because the river could pull you under for a while, and – it never happened to _me_ , of course, but my uncle knew someone – it could get pretty weird, down there. Pretty scary stuff.

 Or something. Sigrun's cheeks had taken all of her blood, leaving none to go to her ears or brain. It was humiliating. It was _awful._

 Berit put a fake-reassuring arm around Sigrun's shoulders. “Didn't that just make you feel alive, all over again?” she said softly. “How horribly _frightening_ it was to not be dead?”

 Sigrun scowled, but the blanket Berit threw over her head and wrapped around her shoulders probably hid that before anyone else saw.

 Berit had known _exactly_ what she was doing. On the bright side, Sigrun decided, the other woman would never, ever tell Aksel about the bet they'd made, no matter how comfortable he ever seemed to get with being dead. (And no matter how unfathomably long that “ever” turned out to be. She didn't feel like betting on that one.)

 That said, she found herself hoping that Sigrun Eide – when she _did_ die, way way in the world's future – would be the kind to keep a secret. She might be, if it was a good enough one. Because Sigrun Larsen eventually admitted to herself that, as dark family secrets go, that bet was _pretty damn funny_ all around.

**Author's Note:**

> Sigrun's ancestors betting on the timing and manner of her death was absolutely Kiraly's idea/fault. She left it sticking out of her pocket a little, so I took it. Disqus is a dangerous place.
> 
> Sorry if my concept of Helheim is intrusively ridiculous. If there's a cirtical ... critique or a necessary fix anyone feels like sharing, I'll be so very much obliged to hear it!
> 
> Also, this is my first fanfic in years, and my first-ever post to AO3. Exciting?


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